


if the moon turns its back on you, i'll still be there

by vaniblue



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, also i gave kaworu a cat but please do not bring up the kaworu cat manga thing, im not super focused on quality so dont expect much, mainly kawoshin with all other relationships as background, might go back and change some chapters eventually, no smut ever, or like republish this somewhere else and edit it, this is basically just me giving kaworu and shinji the break they deserve, yeah - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2019-11-23 06:12:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18148151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaniblue/pseuds/vaniblue
Summary: A collection of interactions that would change the way Ikari Shinji sees his life, many of which involve a certain silver-haired pianist.





	1. february twenty-fifth: first impressions are fleeting, and aren't prologues the same?

Sometimes on those days where he could no longer handle the weight of his life, Shinji simply left the house. With all the release of the falsely accused leaving a successful trial, he walked out of his apartment and down the stairs, out of the lobby with nothing more than himself, a jacket, and the old SDAT he'd dug out of the attic when he left his dad and left the old childhood home he'd practically haunted by the time he'd turned seventeen. He never really left with a location in mind, as he much preferred to engrave himself into the curves of the music staff than have the liberty to think much about anything at times like these.

This time, he found himself near the shore of a beach. 

It was February, and the stark white clouds that covered the sky matched the washed concrete of the boardwalk and the granulated-sugar sand on the beach. It matched the snow falling so slowly that it might as well not have been falling at all, and, the strangest out of all of these, it matched the impossibly pale skin of the boy he found standing next to him, smiling lightly at the sea and leaning his weight against the cold metal railing of the boardwalk's edge. 

In his many days of walking, Shinji had found it becoming increasingly uncommon to see a face he hadn't before, meandering the streets on the edge of the city where he lived. Sometimes he mixed up the faces of people here with those back home. 

This one, he was sure belonged to neither.

As if he was wearing the headphones himself and hearing the same melodies as Shinji always did, the boy turned to meet his gaze, his warm smile filling in the silence between the fading out of one piano and the fading in of another.

"Hello."

"Oh, ah...hello." He said, surprised that the other boy seemed unaffected by his unprecedented staring, and surprised that the snow seemed to have stopped moving altogether, and seemed to have entered a stasis to allow for their meeting.

"If I may ask, what are you doing out here by the water, on a cold day like this?"

"Ah, well," I much prefer walking to anything I might find myself thinking while alone in my apartment on a day like this. "I could ask you the same thing..."

"I suppose that's fair," he laughed, easy and unconcerned, "I'm Kaworu, Nagisa Kaworu, but you can just call me Kaworu."

Kaworu looked at him patiently, lifting himself off of the railing and sliding his hands into the pockets of a heather-grey jacket.

"Ikari Shinji, but, ah, Shinji is fine for me." Kaworu smiles at him, and Shinji turns his eyes to the ground. 

"Well, I do hope we can meet again, Shinji." He turned on his heel, waving a hand over his shoulder and beginning to hum, and a smug voice in Shinji's mind that sounds all too like his mother asks him if maybe he thinks he's found something more worth listening to than the same three tracks playing through his headphones.

It's not until he's all the way back on his apartment building's doorstep that he realizes the snow had begun to fall again.


	2. march seventh: meeting for a second time is just as ephemeral

The next time Shinji meets Kaworu, it's on a particularly bad day in early March. It's raining, and he's sitting under an umbrella at a park, watching kids run around the playground and pondering the cleanliness of the park's structures when a thin finger taps him lightly on the shoulder. 

"K-Kaworu! Ah, hello, again."

Kaworu smiles, seemingly pleased that the smaller boy remembered his name. "Hello, Shinji. May I sit with you?"

"Oh! Uh," he flushed, shifting to one side of the bench, "...Sure."

A pause.

"...Shinji, are you well?" Kaworu frowned, tilting his head to look the brunet in the eye, "You seem tense."

"Oh, I'm-I'm fine...Sorry." Really, he'd been more tense before the pale boy had arrived.

When they had first met, Shinji had attributed the inexplicable calmness he'd felt to the snow, to the stillness of the air and the quiet rolling of waves that had settled on the shore below them. But now, now that it had been two weeks and the last of the snow had melted and the beach was a mile away, he had to wonder if maybe it was something else, something about the way Kaworu had smiled at him, perfectly content, or the cadence and rhythms of his airy voice.

"I can leave, if I make you uncomfortable."

"Oh, no! I, uh, I'd like if you—I mean, no, you can stay."

There was that smile again.

"Hm...You're funny, Shinji," he laughed, light and easy as he took a seat, the metal bench cold to the touch, "I do believe we could become good friends."

"Oh, um...thank you, I think."

"Hm."  
The conversation was allowed by both sides to fade out comfortably, leading into a silence that was oddly smooth and somewhat inviting.

Kaworu's presence acted like a sort of ambient warmth, a pleasant coating on the ever-running thoughts in Shinji's head that he was simultaneously hyper-aware and unwary of, for it seemed easier to allow it to fill the empty spaces between his worries. 

And so for the time being, he allowed the droning of his mind to drift off somewhere, to settle like dust inbetween the cheers coming from the playground, over the steady drumming of the rainfall, and somewhere in the curves of the melody Kaworu had begun to hum at his side.


	3. march twenty-ninth: the number of times we've met could be described as way more than three

The first time they went somewhere together instead of just ending up in the same place at random, they'd met up at the café that was two blocks past Kaworu's apartment, per the plan made two days in advance.

But, surprisingly enough, he hadn't been the one to suggest it. No, the idea had come as a product of Shinji's nervous energy, multiplied by his inexplicable desire to spend time with him. 

"Wait, wait, so you really called me, a busy, working woman, to tell me that you got a date but are too nervous to go?" His friend had said, breath loud against the phone receiver just two hours prior.

"It's just...I don't know if it's, ah, really a _date_...and I don't want to assume, or, something...like that. I'm not sure how to treat it."

Misato had simply laughed and grumbled something about men before promptly hanging up.

Left to his own devices on a Saturday afternoon, he stalked over past his cello on its stand to the mirror propped up on the floor. Staring defeatedly at the clothes scattered around his studio apartment. As much as he felt a need to go through all of them in search of the perfectly-imperfect thing to wear, he had about fifteen minutes and the logical voice in his head, the one that sounded like a certain blue-haired friend of his, said coolly that it's probably fine to dress as he normally would (the new jacket couldn't hurt, though).

It was sunny outside, and he left the house without his SDAT for the first time in a long time.

He actually missed the café twice. It was a small glass door wedged inbetween two shops, and the only thing left of the words on the glass was the adhesive outline of the first four letters of "coffee." Nonetheless, it was cozy, and it seemed like exactly the kind of place Kaworu could be found in.

Which he was, about five seconds later, when Shinji scanned the room for a familiar face and they locked eyes, a small wave from the corner of the shop, wedged into the worn-wood seat under a window.

The tail end of March that the day had settled itself in was full of spring weather and skies with scarce clouds, but the inside of the shop felt more the way a late August evening should, thicker air and pleasant temperature, lacking only in the presence of fireflies and crickets. Narrowly avoiding a fatal collision with a taller woman carrying two steaming mugs, he made his way over, trying his damn hardest not to do something stupid like trip over his own feet. 

Kaworu just smiled. 

"Hello, Shinji."

"Hello. You haven't been waiting long, ah...have you?"

"No, not at all." Because even if he had, he hadn't.

Shinji looked down at the hefty plastic mug on the table in front of him as he sat down, sliding his jacket off of his shoulders and draping it over the back of the chair with an odd amount of care.

"You mentioned once that you liked coffee, but if it's not quite right, I'll buy another cup for you."

He looked up to meet Kaworu's eyes, his own slightly alarmed and embarassment dusting his cheeks.

"Oh, I'm...I'm sure it's fine. You don't, um, have to...have to do that. Thank you." 

He lifts the mug to his mouth, and he can feel Kaworu's candy-red eyes on him as he does. It's not that he expects the coffee to be bad, but he hesitates in the moment, preparing for the worst.

He takes a sip. He blinks, and takes another.

"It's...perfect," and it was. Somehow, Kaworu had made it exactly as he liked it, with enough creamer to be brown but still borderline black, and about as much sugar as a bottle of salt.

"I'm glad." His friend's coffee, Shinji had noticed, was noticeably lighter, and there was about five empty sugar packets sitting open by his elbow.

It strikes him that, for all the times they've met and for every better part of a slow afternoon they've spent together, they really don't know that much about each other.

"You know, Shinji, I think we could stand to know each other a bit better."

"...How did you...?"

"So I see we were thinking the same thing."

Okay, so despite the fact that he swore on everything sacred and also maybe Rei's girlfriend Asuka that Kaworu had just read his mind, he was exactly right.

"Well...what do you want to know?"

"What would you like me to know?"

"I guess I could, um, start with the basics..."  
The other boy looked at him expectantly, looking as though he was prepared to hang on to his every word.

"Well, my birthday is June sixth, and I'm nineteen...my favorite color is purple, and I mostly just play the cello, though I do also like to swim...I don't really have any, ah, 'big plans,' per se...I'm not very sure about what I want to do."

Kaworu considered all this for a moment, indeed hanging on to every word and also maybe the spaces in between, before gathering his thoughts together and giving his own input in the same manner.

"I am also nineteen—my birthday is September thirteenth—and my favorite color is..." 

He trailed off, and for the first time Shinji thought he seemed...confused, if not indecisive.  
Kaworu looked absently around the room for a bit, his eyes darting to the tables in the middle, over the counter and into the back room before they settled right in front of him, right at Shinji.

"My favorite color is blue."

Once again he flushed, and Kaworu smiled with all of the glee of a child who'd just won a game that had been unknowingly thrown in his favor.

"I spend most of my time reading, though sometimes for extra money I play in the city symphony, should they need a pianist. Currently, I'm studying to be a psychologist."

He blinked.

"Hm, I...feel like I should be surprised but—n-not that it's weird or anything, but I—yeah...no, I can definitely see that." He nodded, apparently to himself, but it was true. He could all to easily picture the boy sitting across from him sitting instead behind a large wooden desk, probably wearing a sweater and smiling like he wasn't about to tell you that you were a mess, books stacked behind him and one of those metal nameplates all psychologists and doctors seem to have reading 'Dr. Nagisa Kaworu.'

But anyways.

"You play piano, Kaworu?"

"Hm...Yes, and you play the cello..."

"Yes, well, I'm not too good..."

They shared a look. Kaworu smiled.

"Perhaps we could play together sometime."

"...I think I'd like that."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wanted this one to have a bit more dialogue, but dont worry, my probably-too-close-to-purple-prose descriptions will be back and kickin next chapter


	4. piano keys are sort of like cello strings in a way

Due to a lack of other plans and it being only around two in the afternoon, 'sometime' had come to mean 'now,' though they had stopped to buy something from a bakery they passed ("...You've got a bit of a sweet tooth, don't you, Kaworu?"), and to pick up the cello, of course ("Shinji, let me carry it, I insist,").

Unbearably rich cupcakes and hard plastic instrument cases aside, their destination was the first room on the eighth floor, and the apartment building had an elevator that was apparently faulty at all the wrong times.

"I'm sorry, Shinji, I knew we should've taken the stairs."

"Ah, well, it probably would've taken the same amount of time for me to climb eight flights of stairs..."

"Oh? But you walk so often." 

"...Walking's different."  
Walking with you, that is.

"Hm. That it is."

It suddenly dawns on him exactly how odd all of this is. He's going with a boy he met not even two months ago, accompanying him to his apartment, his home, to play the cello, which he really isn't that great at. Which begs the question: why did Kaworu insist on always being so damn nice? They didn't have any obligation to each other, and frankly he had no idea how they kept meeting like this, and really all of it was so weird and probably his fault somehow and–

"Shinji, we've reached my floor."

"Oh, s-sorry, I was thinking."

"No need to apologise."

He gestures for Shinji to exit the elevator, picking up the cello case and following behind.

"I'm right here," he says, stopping in front of a door, "Apartment 801."

He rummages through a pocket or so, frowns, reaches over to the other sides and picks through a few more before producing a small key with a keychain reading 'K. Nagisa 801.' His lock takes quite a bit of fiddling to work, but eventually the door swings open wide, sending out a wave of colder air and sending a wave of nervousness over Shinji.

"Adam, I'm home."

...Adam? Who was that? Oh god, did Kaworu have a roommate? Oh god, oh no–

"Shinji, meet Adam," his words acting as an announcement to accompany to padding of paws down the hall. Setting the cello case aside, Kaworu gently scooped up a very small black cat, "Adam, Shinji."

Oh, good. Not a person. Tentatively, he extended his overturned hand to the cat, who leaned forward to sniff him with equal hesitation, hesitation which unfortunately was short lived.

"Adam, no! Do  _not_ bite Shinji! I apologize, he normally does not bite guests..."

"Oh, it's, uh, not a big deal, really...just a bit of a shock," he said, shoving his hand into his pocket but not entirely able to hide the resulting flinch.

Adam leaped from Kaworu's arms, who let him go compliantly. He reached for Shinji's hand, pulling it from his pocket.

"You're bleeding Shinji–here, let me get you a bandage," he said releasing his grip on a slightly pink Shinji and making his way out through the hall. What a great start this was off to.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OOPS this is like. short but i hadnt updated in a while so *shrug emoji*


End file.
